HelluvaGirl

Love is above decency, family, material welfare, betrayal and everything else.

You see a polished person and admire them having mastered the subtleties of the requisite performance expected from their marital, social and money status. But you also see through: it’s not in their blood. There is something else in their heart that only needs a trigger to be released, and then there is no stopping of the fateful. It takes unspeakable courage to make choices that have no rational substantiation, that impose loss and sometimes tragedy; choices one makes out of Love.

Misfits. Those are people who will still love their lesbian daughter who cannot come out and be accepted for what she is by anyone else in the noble family. Those people will most probably follow their heart instead of tradition, decency and duty, given the heavy choice. They will try their best to suit the society and next of kin, but Love is of another matter and once they see it, it’s impossible to unsee.

And they will make their choice – scared to the point of their mind going yellowish white, but they will tell their husband and have him approach, take off his jacket from their shoulders with one sweep of a hand – together with respect, acceptance and protection they have been granted. From that moment, they are nothing to him and his high-society bourgeois famiglia. Freed from an elegant tight mourning dress by their faithful maid, they will run like an animal: barefoot, in a hurry, halting just to receive the daughters’s blessing nod.

They run to not be stopped because they know: they’ll die barred in their castle of decorum sooner than they might die from guilt they’ll carry for the rest of their lives for the chaos Love has brought upon their closest.

I watched this film years ago and it made perfect sense to me. It’s like the Book says: human relationships, rules and agreements are earthly matters. Love – that energy of life, another name of God some of us are blessed to face – it usually looks like a curse because it is not subject to our logic and perceived world order. That Love may swipe away everything you own – just think about all the prophets and what they gave for nearing it.

The film setting is in a city I always felt curious about after seeing I Am Love. Now that I’ve experienced Milan, it was just the time to write about it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZBrWVvn9xA